Fallen Angels
by Haruka-new3
Summary: From a dream I made a long time ago. It is a ShizNat fanfic, in an alternate universe, well... cyberpunk... so, obviously it is shoujoai. Rated M for the crudity of some situations. I hope you will enjoy it :P
1. Chapter 1

**So, I had this in my mind for a long, long time. I wrote this in Italian, of course, but I never had the courage to try to translate it in English. But, in the last week, I got a message from a user, about Under a Black Sky, and so I told myself: come on, Haru, we can do it. **

**So, here I am… You know, my English is not that great, and this can be a bad translation, even if I prey it won't be. So… well, here it is… **

**Oh yes, this also is a story that I wrote after a dream, so there will be some oddities in it. Please, don't let you bother by the names, I swear it is a ShizNat fanfic :P **

**1. **

She was falling.

She was falling in a black abyss, made by virtual codexes, dancing around her figure, as the mad whirls upon a wintry sea. She was unable to say if she felt cold: no sensation was able to break the dolorous wave that was tearing every single layer of her body, while the falling was becoming an ecstatic fly, emphasized by a wordless cry. She had her eyes wide open, her arms outstretched as if that simple gesture could grant her the necessary ability to reacquire control upon her trajectory. The truth was that she was falling inside a sort of funnel, a dreadful funnel that was created by her own foolishness. She could feel the pain of her limbs, as if they were lacerated by a thousand of swords, while her thoughts were fluctuating inside her projective mind, led by the fumes of her last drug cocktail.

She desired so much to be able to cry out all the pain she was feeling, but she couldn't. Oh, even if she had been able to find the strength and courage, inside herself, to declaim the divine ecstasy she was feeling, and then disappear for the eternity in that flow that, in her most precious and remote dreams, hadn't a very end... Oh, even if she had been able to find that barlume of hopes, of identity, that – she knew – that there was, that there had to be, somewhere, hidden between the folds of her soul. If so, then everything would have been all right, everything would have had sense.

If so, she had been free, for the last time. About that, she was absolutely sure, in that unconscious way that only the children, or the defenceless, or maybe the fouls, had. But, that barlume isn't in her, anymore, and for that reason, now, she was falling.

Nor that, that kind of thoughts had any importance, in that moment: the falling was leading her nearest to the hard ground, beneath her figure. She could see it right in front of her: a thick and black stain in the darkness, a threatening menace even more near, even more real. If there was the wind, around her, hissing around her black hair, she wasn't able to feel it, anymore. If there was a reason, for her state, she didn't knew it, anymore. The hard ground beneath her was changing under her green eyes, wide open in the flux of the fall. It was acquiring shape and colour: here there was the fangs of a dragon, there the scales of a dinosaur, over there the torn wings of a black bat. And, everywhere, there was the quiet and noiseless of the code, with its vortexes, its geometrical and stylized structures: even in that foul situation, she could read and understand it as if it was her native language, as if she hadn't done anything else in her own life, other than read it. She could recognize the Melton's program signs, the Kaim's barrier that it was told to be impenetrable, but... she had avoided it, hadn't she? Yes, she had when her life was really hers, when she could define herself as a complete woman, before the arrive of the Legates.

If she focused her mind above it, even if for an instant, she could still perceive the wave that gave sense and solutions to the alphanumeric flow, vivid as if it was illuminated by a pure and divine light; that echo that, she knew it, would have driven her once more near to the Barrier, to break it, and to find the pulsating fulcrum of the Pyramid of the Possibilities. It was so, wasn't it? She had done it, hadn't... she?

Had she truly done it?

The code unthread around her figure, without arresting her inglorious fall, the upside-down ascent toward the nothing of the eternity, while the abyss assumed the form of a distorted alcove and the ground was always nearer, incumbent. Soon. Soon Alex would be ended straight against it, and there was no verse, there was no way to prevent that: even she couldn't desire anything else that her own cerebral death, that death that would have made her free, forever.

Here and there, feathers of black angel appeared from the walls of that inverted funnel, unthreading nearby her figure, as if she had been a Cherub sent away by the heaven toward unknown beaches, bathed by the fluid wave of the primitive sin. And, after all, she was indeed a fallen angel, in her personal way to be: she had lost everything, every reason, every possibility, every future.

She had got only that instant, subtracted to their control, the fervent expectation of her own end and the innate ability to read in the string of letters and numbers, launched on the net at an impressive speed, multiplied by the cybernetic grafts that the Legates had brought her as a gift; that same grafts that, in the exaltation of the decoding, made its eyes of the colour of the pure obsidian, almost to remember her that, after all, she wasn't human anymore.

And, perhaps it was really so. Her humanity had gone lost: they had stolen it in a night without moon and, somewhere, there was a headstone, with her name engraved above, that name that, despite all of her efforts, she wasn't able to remember. Yes, her true name, lost forever as the whole rest.

And then, her whole anger made its own road from her torn heart and inside the heart of the world, and there was no other way to break that flow, to destroy the monster that they had created, if not that to complete that unnatural flight, that would have conducted her soon among the arms of the nothing endless. Because Alex was only that: a monster, a forever lost monster, a pawn in unknown hands, that had the consistence of black claws, dark fingers in accord with twisted, distorted laughters, illuminated by a white light that doesn't heat, as the neon lamps, in the lanes of the hospitals.

They would have been able to kill her from a moment to the other, if they had wanted it: after all, she was only one of the so many "lost children", assassins without face and without name, able to penetrate data barriers that would have made to desist the best among the programmers, the more expert among the hackers of new generation.

And it didn't care if she was the best. Others would have come to commit new crimes, because, indeed, all of them were only this: lost souls in the vortex of the events, invaded by the blind anger of whom has seen his own life eradicated, cancelled with a hit of sponge and knows very well that can't do anything else, if not obey, to continue an existence consumed by the sinister fire of the revenge. And constantly to crave the vault key, the ability to grab that only extreme instant of radiant freedom. And it was only for that purpose, that Alex kept on living, in the absurd research of that moment that belonged only and exclusively to her: the exaltation of an instant, that instant looked for, built, made perfect by her own inflexible wish. Only by her wish. And, it didn't care if such instant had also been the apex of the fall: her own death.

And yes, for this reason now she was falling, she was sinking in a ripped reality that didn't belong entirely to her. For this motive, now, she was running toward that dark wall, jagged, with a distorted smile again drawn on her lips, the face illuminated by an unhealthy light, that face that in any way would have been able to pass unnoticed, between hundreds of people, in the constant tide of the whole world. Beautiful. They would have defined her beautiful, if only they had had the time to stop to observe the high cheekbones, the eyes of the colour of the jade, the hair's joining, far toward left, that made her face oddly asymmetrical, impossible to be forgotten.

And lethal. They would have called her lethal, if only they had had the time to understand the way according to which the Death danced around her eccentric and thin, harmonious and elegant oriental figure, made unforgettable by the way to move of whom is grown in the slums of the "Districts' Tokyo", where the standing out towers of the multimillionaire empires created only black shades over shades even more darker. But Alex didn't care about it: in that instant, she would have swapped every part of herself, if only she had been able to find herself somehow complete and free, once more, even if for the last time.

Instead, she was falling. And the distance from the ground was so miserable to be able to feel the thin and threatening sound of the wind on the walls of that deadly trap, that it existed only in her mind, projected in the Matrix. Somehow, that increasing buzz brought to her mind distorted, distant imagines. Perhaps memories. The sound of remote sirens in the roads, animated by the pushers, as extended cobwebs on the world of the living beings and, here and there, the cry of a distant drum, stolen to the African nights, and then the rhythmic sound of the percussions that grows in an unknown world and that becomes energy and then returns to be protagonist in its upside-down universe, and again changes consistence and returns to the native nucleus from which everything has had its beginning... and becomes again code. The code. Black and dense, fluent, launched in so many complex, incomprehensible geometries.

How in the Hell, would she have been able to stop observing it, now that it was dancing around her figure, transmuting under her eyes, and reproducing itself as if it were animate by the same eccentric life that animates the complex relationships of the double helix of Dna? Now that in the flow of the last instant, once more, it was revealing itself as her perfect lover, ready to answer to every stimulus, every thought come by her, how she would have been able to part from it?

No, she would never have succeeded in stopping to observe its schemes and its ramifications, the crystalline structures that only few others were able to discern with so much simplicity and naturalness, to modify them with the ability of a musician that draws pure notes from the ropes of a harp. To lose herself in the tide, in the smokes of the code, was the same to forget.

And to forget meant, somehow, to grant herself the luxury to dream that there had been a time in the sign of the purity of her mind, by now forever lost. And, yet, she didn't care if the hard ground was always nearer, as was the naked earth, ready to become the altar for her very desired, extreme gesture. She would have granted herself to the death in that way, scrutinizing and studying the kaleidoscope of numbers and letters in complex structures; yes, it was all right, this way.

Yet, once more, for the umpteenth time, something in the structure succeeded in escaping her understanding, her control, something thin that seemed to be there, ready to make fun of her intelligence, and then able to disappear under her proper nose when she believed to have found the correct key of reading.

No, she couldn't certain allow that her death, extreme act of abandon and redemption, turned out to be imperfect. It was the only thing that she had, and she would never have consented to any, miserable particular to ruin the only thing for which it was still worth to continue to exist. Yet every time she went so far, every time the ground raised against her upside-down flight, the trace reappeared. And here it is, hidden behind a spiral of ascendant numbers, sinister as the malicious smile of a baby that has just committed a prank.

A look toward the ground was enough to become aware of the inevitable impact, while the characters of the code, that were animating the walls of that unnatural cave, were straining down as ink, as the desolate painting in Dalì's pictures, downward, inside the apex of that parable torn apart from the plans of existence. And the last part of her conscience recorded once more the imperfection, because it wasn't the right way according to which the things had to go, and she knew it well. However, the code's flow was recomposing under her obsidian eyes, answering to the dynamics of unknown commands, exactly in the place where Alex was about to break.

She was here.

She was almost there.

It was over: "More".

The infiltrated letters were shining in a strange character of flaming gold, repeating the same message in an endless way.

"More".

Anything it meant, anything that trace represented, Alex wasn't able to understand it, and despite her desire to find its source, every time, she found herself in and endless battle against dense and mocking shades; every time, she found in her hands the usual fist of flies that became ash among her tapered fingers. Every single time, was the same. As if something or someone constantly wanted her alive, animating her soul with an unhealthy challenge in that hunting without end.

The impact was devastating. She fell in the exact center of the golden "O" of that so much hated word, with her arms crossed above her head, as if that simple gesture could protect her, while for the umpteenth time the projective barrier of the Matrix creaked and then broke. She felt the stroke in her bones, in her head, in every single vein of her painful body, when the hard ground opened in a golden pentacle. With arcane symbols of an ancient magic, made by programs and structures, dynamics and incomprehensible syntaxes, the ground changed itself in new seals, that her unknown hunter had interwoven in her most unconfessable nightmares, subtracting the girl from the desired death. And Alex passed straight inside the circle of the possibilities, in the swaying sphere of her broken identity. Unharmed.

When she opened her eyes, she lay to the feet of her bed, with on her lips, the rancid taste of blood and bile. Once more, she had been so nearby, and yet, once more she had survived to the cerebral death that she was searching, still holding in the narrow fist of her right hand the little box of black pills. She could feel the cables of connection to the Matrix, connected at the base of her numbed neck. They were painfully pulsing. Everything had been ruined by that damned virus, by that damned word, that now was echoing inside her broken mind. "More." She would have sold her soul to understand who was hiding behind such joke. She would really have done it, only to be able to rest in peace, finally. But, despite her desire, there was no verse to come to and end. And, even if it hurt, she was condemned to a life that she didn't want to live anymore.


	2. Chapter 2

**And so, here it is Fuj****ino-san. I don't remember if I said this before, but, this time I want to look into Natsuki's anger, and really I think that, despite the Alternate Universe, she is absolutely IC, but please let me know your opinion about the work, as always.**

**Oh yes, like I said the other time, she really is Natsuki and there are good reasons to her to be called with another name. You will see, while the story will go on :)**

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**2.**

There was around her, in the night blessed by dense clouds, here to hide the starry sky, the smell of frying fishes that came up from the stands, through the crumbling buildings that impended over the dark alleys of the Districts' Tokyo, her Tokyo. Alex was silent above one of the tallest roofs in the chosen lane, the right elbow rested on the knee, lifted against one of the parapets. She liked to observe the life while it was passing below her figure, motionless in the night, as a hawk right to fling against its next, unaware prey. In those instants, she had the feeling to be able to conquer the world, if only she had wanted it, to be able to have every thing she liked.

Two days had passed, from the last attempt of suicide, from the impact with the hard reality of her existence. She remembered to have spent them in the narrow and dark room that the Legates had submitted her as operative center, surrounded by the sinister humming of the electronic equipments and of the terminals connected to the dorsal of the city. She knew that, below those grey and black cables, a sophisticated network of equipments and threads, as a wicked cancer hidden under the epidermis of her city, screened her presence to the eyes of the daily world. She knew that from there, she could stir silent and lethal, turning herself into the perfect combination between physical efficiency and mental intuition. The definitive data assassin.

She have hardly saved her own life, this time, but, however, she had succeeded.

She wasn't quite surprised in find, again, a non indifferent amount of money on the account destined to her, nor she was surprised for the crypted message, regarding her next objective: a self-possessed, unknown man, without any meaning, at least for her, who behaved as an hero, in the dark streets of the metropolis. About him, she knew only the necessary: that he had acquired too much autonomy, that he behaved as a master and that, to the true masters, he served as the umpteenth example to avoid that cases as him became daily. Obviously, that didn't have any importance to Alex. But the pay was good and, even if at least two parts out three would have gone to purchase the necessary equipment and to modify it for the purpose, the remaining part would have guaranteed her to survive a little more. In any case, did she have the possibility to choose? Sooner or later, they would be gotten tired of her and found a clean way to eliminate the girl, even putting behind her one of the little girls of last generation, or maybe one of the alien clones that, it was said, wandered at night around the cities, even if Alex had never seen one of those.

In any case, she had accepted the work without a single word. After all, perhaps, she liked that, as she was telling to herself, while her look of the colour of liquid obsidian darted toward the alleys downward, analysing with attention every shadow, every thin filament of life, every wake of identity that could bring her to the netxt, sacrificial victim. However, even if she liked it, she didn't know anymore. She had perhaps forgotten even what it meant to be able to like something. But, had there been a time in which all those things were different? Had there been, indeed? She never had dreams, if not when she assumed drugs. Probably, those bastards of the Legates had also tore them away from her. So, every time she dreamt, under the incomprehensible push of synthetic substances, the images that appeared in front of her look were distorted and incoherent. She could feel the smell of the food in a cafeteria, students' laughters in the corridors of what it seemed a school, but for how much she strove to perceive their faces, every time, the only thing that she succeeded in seeing was a wave of dark masks and white eyes, produced in series by her sick mind. She had always known that wasn't worth to keep on trying that foolish game. But, then, why? Why did she persist with such fury?

Alex inhaled the air of the night, sending away the umpteenth, inopportune thought from her mind, while in distance the light of a neon flickered and then died out. In the dark, she felt her own look focus, to find the correct trajectory, and then, the modified rifle appeared from the nothing below her black raincoat, opened as the wings of the Cherub that she wasn't anymore. That, perhaps, she had never been. The opaque barrel of her weapon, extended downward, created now a virtual bridge between the underlying world and her, the tense thread of a spider, while in her visual field it made its appearance the umpteenth John Smith without face and without name. If she had still had a crumb of humanity, she would perhaps have tried a little sorrow, for him. But she didn't have anymore.

She saw him rub his the hands to warm up his body, in the nightly cold, while he was going out from the back of a second category restaurant. She studied the contours of his thin jacket, the way according to which he brought to him lips a cigarette and lit it, the reflex of the flame on the metal bar that girded his forehead and covered his right eye, evidently an installation of cybermedic of last generation, perhaps only a led, or more probably an inside visual micromonitor, constantly in contact with the data of the Matrix.

She pulled the trigger of the syntax-defragmentator as a boy breaks a couple of hashi in front of his smoking ramen, without thinking twice upon it, without tasting the instant, because such instant didn't have any importance to her, but already letting herself to be absorbed by the sweetish fragrance of the fried chicken that wound every thing. After all, the man without face would have had to know, he would have had to understand the situation since the beginning: the Legates were everywhere. The Legates are everywhere. The Legates know everything. And who betrays, doesn't have any hope. Alex sighed, putting against the ground the butt of the rifle, and abandoning against it the hollow of her right arm, almost as if she was embracing the best among her lovers. Now, the opaque barrel aimed accusatory toward the dark sky. It had something ancient and mysterious at the same time, or, maybe, there was something of damned elegant in the way according to which it distributed the death, something of infinitely sensual. She hadn't left any trace that could bring back to that moment, to that instant, to her hands: she had codified the weapon by herself, to make that the job clean and crystalline, immaculate and sterile, a pure emission, an ultra-thin wave, an overload of data that exclusively struck from the distance its designate prey, altering with an overdose of data, modified ad hoc by those as her, the code of "pre-natal recording" that was installed, by now, in the brain of every child on the Earth.

And there still was some diplomatic who, displaying a boasted, fair smile, sold off the natal installation as the maximum apex of the human science, as it regarded the census of the sentient life on the Earth. Foolish, poor men. They were all in the hands of the Legates, and nobody seemed to understand the truth.

And now, the man lay in the ground, the right hand raised as if he wanted to reach the temple, the contracted face as if it was a victim of a cerebral ictus. Idiot. It was only his guilt.

- Lethal as few others...

The voice at her right made her start. How had he arrived there? Alex slowly turned toward him, as soon as to succeed in perceiving the face of the man, shaded by the night. How the hell did he stir with so much quickness and in perfect silence, remained a mystery also to the girl. A sudden, sharp pain crossed her left shoulder, where she brought the signs of a scar of which she didn't have memories, tearing her an uncontrolled grimace. Downward, agitated voices began to rise in the air, a woman's cry, the smell of the rotten fish. Slowly, the girl estranged from the parapet, observing the figure wound in a black and golden yukata, already by her side. The hard lines of the face and the tone of the voice revealed his total indifference for the operation settled by his best murderess. For a moment, Alex warned the persuasive touch of the fear and the intense cold of her own skin, in contact with her clothes: what kind of things was that emotionless man able to do? But that feeling disappeared within a second, while the right hand of her dark mentor stretched out to graze the base of her nape. Even if she wanted, she didn't succeed in repressing an unintentional shiver, while, with the already cut-off breath, her obsidian eyes recorded a string of glimmering data to the left angle of her visual field. Every time, was the same.

And then, in a completely unexpected way, unaware even to her mentor, it happened.

The school corridor was full of students of the first year, with their clean faces and the immaculate black and green uniforms. She could see the badge of the Academy – of the Academy? – on the foulards of the girls, on the collars of the boys' shirts. She would have wanted to be able to laugh with them. She would have wanted to be able to laugh at every thing that surrounded her, to laugh for joy, in the instant without time that precedes the swan song.

A sweet voice, pronounced by a shadow without face, made her turn, smile, then nod. But, wouldn't she have had to be to one of those boring lessons of the course for Ambassadors? What was she doing there, in the corridor that leaned out the classes of the students of Computer Science? No, obviously she wasn't angry. And, yes, they would have been able to have lunch together, she cannot wait to taste with her the bento that she had prepared the evening before. The scent of the vegetables, mixed to that of the flowers, mixed to hers, in the sunny courtyard. Really. Really...

- You have everything you need. I will find you again, at the end of the job, Alex. Remember my words: this mission is your personal door for the Heaven or for the Hell. The Legates observe.

The voice of the man brought her back to the reality of that dark night. The agitated voices under the black lane were turned into complaints, now: a woman, under them, groaned, torn to pieces by the loss of her beloved. Alex moved another footstep on the terrace of the building, but when she turned to look around, there was not more trace of her informant. As always, however.

She closed her eyes. To whom did that voice belong? That delicate voice that now she didn't succeed to get away from her head, that voice that had appeared from the shadows of her past in the same instant in which the start code for the next mission took life in front of her lost look? To whom did that wake belong, the ghost of such a beloved fragrance, smell of good, genuine things? Because, that was her past, wasn't it? It had to be, even if she wasn't able to remember. Yes, it had to be this way. If only she had been able to look at herself, now, she would have perceived the left shade of the doubt, in her reflex, behind the eyes again of the colour of pure jade, now that the nightly mission had been finished, now that there was no more need to enjoy the flow of the code, to understand the nature of its binary structure, fluttering in the Matrix, to be able to use it against the whole world.

The door for the Heaven. She wondered about its decorations, asking herself if they had golden and silver veins, the same veins that she perceived in that mocking message, that thin trace that ran after her in her unavowable nightmares, that mysterious wave that was become concrete in the last times and that she could glimpse every time she lowered her defences, leaving the flow of the Matrix free to swallow her mind.

Pursuing the wake of a thought, she wondered if when she had reached the double columns of the Heaven – because she imagined them that way, in dark red, with dragons grasped around the pillars, absorbed in an ascended without end – she would finally have understood the tenuous nature of that accursed word, the sordid and pulsating and alive nucleus of all of her anxieties and fears. How could it exist something that succeeded in escaping her control, in that way?

There had been a time – had there really been? – in which she believed to be the best coder of her generation. And, after all, hadn't those bastards of the Legates removed from her mind everything, except her capacities? Even her name, even the dearest memories, her relatives' faces, their voices, all, maintaining intact her talent, her ability to discern inside the subtle messages of a world made by shadows, to edit, to cancel, to re-wind, to distort the virtual data, to draw the maximum benefit, with the least effort.

The door for the Heaven? No, there was any Heaven, any life that was worth to be lived, any death to taste. And it was all fault of that single, simple word, a bright trail as the lighting of the vectors daily launched towards the heart of the universe, where there were the colonies of new generation. For her, there was only a deep, breathless desperation. And a simple truth made in characters of fire, engraved as a mark without time, inside the more hidden layer of her torn heart: "More."

More.

Even more.

Oh yes, she was sinking more and more downward, in the abyss of her madness, but her chaser, her bloodhound, the worm that gnawed her from inside, it was always there.

Alex closed her eyes, returning to slowly breathe the air of the night, finding again her natural calm. She felt the cold of the metal of her syntax-defragmentator against the tapering fingers of her right hand. She felt the wind caressing her face and shifting her black hair upon her shoulders, she felt the clouds clearing a little in the night sky. It was time to go, and she knew it well. She granted herself only a brief moment to get estranged from the reality and to catch again the flow of code of his informant.

Had he realized? Had he understood that the ghost of a memory had appeared in front of her tormented conscience? Probably not, or he would never have left her in life. She grinded the teeth for her impotence: the memory had been so brief, so slim. And the code was roaring, as if it pretended the attention of the murderess. She saw its trace, always there, behind the folds of a postulation, but she decided to ignore it for this time: she had a job to do. Images were accompanying the words, now, while she was following the trail of her satellite connection, tracing a careful mental sketch, a dynamic project that unfolded in her mind as the plot of Tokyo sewers.

Everything was aiming to the heart of Alex's next victim, a girl wearing a ceremonial, purple kimono, with a cup of black tea still smoking among the elegant fingers of the hands of a pianist, while the name of the briefing of the mission was flashing in front of the obsidian look of the girl, struggling as a silver carp that wanted to emerge from the net of thousand and thousand grey carps, each equal to the others. This time, the umpteenth John Smith answered to the name of Shizuru Fujino, of Fujino's dynasty.

There was no need to be surprised about the fact that the young girl with the crimson eyes and the clear hair, of whom partly displays american origins, was the door that led to Heaven. Or to the Hell. Jointly with the Legates, the Fujino were the masters of the world. Hadn't they create the "pre-natal recording", after all? Wasn't thanks to them that the Legates dominated everything on the Earth? Shizuru Fujino. That girl was only the spectre of a symbol, the new face of the ancient family, the image of goodness and respectability that the aristocrat dynasty sold to the whole world.

After all, all the world had spoken for months about her, about the child prodigy, the favourite daughter of the most important family of the country, family of lawyers and engineers, but, above all, family of researchers and famous geneticists all over the world. Even Alex hadn't been able to avoid to be surprised by her beauty, her elegance, the harmony of the Anglo-Saxon lines in accord with the curve of her lips, and the shape of the crimson eyes, in the photos of the advertising manifestos that had filled the diurnal Tokyo, for months and months, to publicize the big party during which Shizuru Fujino had officially been introduced to the world, as the new spokesman and gem of her family.

But Alex knew perfectly what was hidden behind that image of perfect, empty appearance. Instinctively, she wondered if Fujino-san knew everything, too. Perhaps, the girl had discovered as the things really were, and that was the reason according to which, now, she was on Alex's personal list of blood.

Bothered by all those reflections, the girl sent away that thought from her mind and, quickly as she had appeared, abandoned the building roof, leaving behind her only the wake of a memory, in the gilded eyes of a black cat, unaware witness.


	3. Chapter 3

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**Well, here I'm again. I'm studying very hard in these times because there soon will be three tests for the university, so I haven't the time I need to translate the fanfiction. But, anyway, now I'm here, so please enjoy the update and, don't forget to review  
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**3. **

The dust was dancing in silent thin volutes, illuminated by the oblique rays of the sun in the dawn. They filtered, inopportune, through the tear of one of the three windows with darkened glasses, descending upon the ledge of a table full of sibylline equipments. Closing her eyes, Alex could feel the prickly smell of the oil for the gears, of the solvents for the mechanical tools, in that dark room above the underground drains of her Tokyo.

Immobile at the center of the room, the oriental girl seemed fragile, a possible and unexpected presence in the endless cycle of the possibilities, in the life of the man who peacefully sat at the obstructed desk. Behind his shoulders, a glimmering structure of cables, metal and flashing led represented the thin threshold that gave access to the screened Matrix.

The Rat lifted the two-colour print look in the direction of the young girl and smiled, with his red eye illuminated by a wake of little letters and characters, dancing on the external retina, perfectly visible and sinister. The code was everywhere, Alex was aware of this and the Rat, well, it was the living evidence of that truth.

- I didn't expect you to come so early, my child.

His voice possessed an indefinite tonality, soft, as the warm tone of the jazz players in the old New Orleans, oddly able to impose quiet in every listener, even able to bewitch and to appease her mind in tumult. For an instant, she wondered on the fact that all the people she knew persisted to call him "Rat" and it was quite strange, after all the old man had some spellbinding lines and surely he had been a beautiful man during his youth. There was something reassuring in his smile, something oddly human, despite the artificial red eye, something alive in the pale blue iris of its companion.

Alex smiled, nodding at his words and pointing out with her chin a chair not too far from the desk, as if she wanted to ask the tacit permission to sit. She knew that she needed time to explain as the things were and, evidently, he also knew it. Smiling to the girl, the Rat assented, pouring from a warm kettle two cups of Italian black smoking coffee.

- Are you here to telling me goodbye, my child?

Alex lifted the look of her jade eyes towards the aged face, following the thin line of the candid hair, sighing for the expected question, while she was taking place. Vulnerable as ever, she knew that she have to face her feelings, her fears. And she knew that she have to win that game. Slowly she forced herself to relax never diverting her attention from the imperturbable face of his interlocutor. The Rat existed, in her memories, since the first instants of which she had memory. The old man there had been always, there in that dark room that leaned out on the threshold of the world, the true world, her world. And Alex knew well to be on the edge of the chasm, opened as a precipice upon the abysses of the hell, the true hell, and not that that bastards of the Legates would have wanted to sell her as true: the complex system of underground galleries that spread below the "Districts' Tokyo".

How many times was she sheltered in that room, when the shade of the Legates followed her in the sleep? He had always helped her, always, even if Alex didn't succeed in remembering their true, first meeting, if there had been one different from the only one of which she had memory. How had she met him? Where? When? Had it happened before "they" came in her life? Or had it been a joke of the destiny that had enacted their bond?

One day, he pounced in her life, picking up her from one of the darkest hovels of the ducts. The mission, one of the first that had been submitted to the girl, had gone so badly that she had almost risked her own life. But he had saved Alex, he had brought her there, in that unknown crumbling building, and he had taken care of her until she had recovered, before redelivering her to her half life, and to the Legates. The Rat had never put her questions about her life, even if she had soon told him everything, perhaps in the blind hope that he could save her from that fate. But, even the Rat hadn't known how to do something for her lost memory, to really help her. Or, maybe, he hadn't wanted to do something so risky?

And now, his question echoed in the room as a death sentence: had she really come there, challenging the looks of the observers, only to tell him goodbye? Obviously no, but somehow the idea that their meeting could really be the last made her smile, of that bitter smile that only the defeats know.

- I need a last favour, old man.


End file.
